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The Power of Thoughts – on Birth

“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life …work on the mind.
That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that.
Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”

(from the book “Eat, pray, love” by Elizabeth Gilbert)

Mastering to control my mind and thoughts is a big issue for me these days.

Just as the baby in my womb grows and develops, also my inner thoughts are growing and developing, especially by night:
Sleeping isn’t as easy and comfortable as before and I often wake up. Then I lie in bed and observe my thoughts on wander. They switch from work at school to daily family concerns, from preparing exams to choosing baby-names.

But I much prefer the baby-names-thoughts during night and I really try now to control my mind, to calm down and to relax. I don’t want to allow project-, business- and work-related thoughts to enter our sleeping room any more, disturbing the peace of the night. I want them to stay outside.

I try then to concentrate on preparing myself for a homebirth, thinking about it just as I did four years ago.
I try to work on my inner consciousness, to empower my body again for a natural birth and I also go into communication with baby.

After three blessed homebirth experiences, and especially after the last beautiful unassisted one, alhamdulillah, I am very aware of the fact how much our whole attitude and our thought and beliefs, especially the unconscious ones, can affect the birthing process. So I am consciously working again on a positive thinking:

I know that birth is nothing to fear at all.
It is NOT a potentially dangerous happening and does NOT have to be scary and full of pain at all – because different than any other pain, the natural pain in labour might actually become even ecstatic and normally leads to an end with a very positive result.

Birth is the most natural happening and can become one of the most blessed and empowering experiences in the life of a woman, subhanallah, filling her with grace and brave and with an overwhelming love for the baby, that will blissfully accompany her during the ups and downs of the whole mothering years.

God provided us women with everything we need for birth and such as He made the human race reproduce itself instinctively since millions of years, He also made it possible for us to deliver in natural and instinctive ways: we just need to stay in contact with nature, with our own body and to listen to its actual needs.
Making sure that the birth happens in an environment we feel comfortable and safe in, accompanied by close and familiar people we like, being free to move and to act as we feel, in an atmosphere of privacy, is also a very important fact for a beautiful and successful natural birthing experience.

The existence of modern medicine and technology is surely sometimes a blessing and needed in some cases, but it should never lead us to give up contact with our body, to loose trust in nature or to give up our self-determination.

Because, in the end it is us, the women, and nobody else, who have to push out the baby and to free it towards the world. If we give up that difficult but blessed duty too easily, out of fear or other unnatural reasons, by using modern intervention, unneeded c-section or other pain-preventing medication, we also give up the chance to grow with the birthing experience, we give up the gift to feel the euphoria and we rob ourselves and the baby of the producing of important hormones for the mothering and bonding process.

Remembering all of this can already enable a woman to overcome her deepest fears, to trust in the ability of her own body and can lead to a very positive approach on childbirth, that will help her to experience it as a blessed gift, inchaallah.

That’s what I deeply wish and pray for, for you and for me, for the babies and for all of us.

To deepen your knowledge on natural birth, no matter if at home or in hospital, I highly recommend the books from Ina May Gaskin and Ingeborg Stadelmann.

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5 thoughts on “The Power of Thoughts – on Birth”

Dearest Itto,
Asalaam alaikum and congratulations!…as I always follow your journeys! I wanted to say how much your post resonated with me…I am mother of 5 children (ages 6-17) and all were with a midwife and with no pain medication. I felt I had to be fully present at birth, mind, soul, and body…I felt it was deeply necessary for me to go through this, although I was in a hospital setting (my husband wasn’t comfortable with a home setting!). Birth is such a deep spiritual process which for women will stay with us forever in this life…like you, I have experienced and understand that taking control of your mind is essential and you have to develop incredible inner strength…that you have done this before leaves no doubt that you are up for it again enshallah..Blessings and my prayers are with you to you and your family on this journey of motherhood (again!)

Salaam Itto,
Unfortunately, here in Morocco homebirth is often seen as something backward, dangerous or crazy, even though it was the norm less than a century ago and still is in rural areas (but not because they want to, rather because there are nearly no medical facilities available to them).
I truly hope I’ll be able to have my babies at home when I’ll get married inshaAllah.
God bless you with a healthy baby, Itto! May the delivery be easy inshaAllah.